Growing Ideas

Plant a seed, take care, watch and see it grow!

Today I read an article by a senior educationalist saying Pilot projects sshow that if you have an idea, run by interested people, with good financial backing... they make a positive difference to a child's education.

Pretty obvious, the trick is to spread that difference beyond the carefully nurtured 'pilot' ground.

I am organising a wind turbine pilot at the moment and one key outcome is reproducibility. I have worked with teachers to secure funding for one pilot, a fact finding series of trips for pupils, teacher development and training for the pilot, and finally two teacher training events at which we will give participants at least 2 cd's of material and multiple kits to take away and use in their own classrooms. In this way the project should grow beyond its initial pilot stage.

I have in front of me a £1500 cd/dvd automated disc copying machine and printer. With this, organisations hosting events can give teachers multiple copies of info to give to others. I thought at first that hosting the stuff online was the answer but writing and hosting huge media websites is far more time consuming and ultimately costly than knocking out a few CD's at less than £1 each. Some materials will go on youtube but most will be on the CD.

A pilot is like growing seeds in a greenhouse under ideal consitions... It will almost always work! The next stage is to find out how to grow those seeds in real soil and still get a good crop. All my future bids to funders will include teacher training events from now on.. to get them out of the greenhouse!